Sydney Sweeney Savvily Shows Off Her Scream Queen Chops in ‘Immaculate’

It’s not unusual for a newly anointed romantic comedy star to pivot into thriller mode. Julia Roberts followed up her supernova-making turn in Pretty Woman with the domestic-violence thriller Sleeping with the Enemy, and it became a smash hit on the previous movie’s back (as well as a future bad-taste relic). Jennifer Lopez’s first foray into rom-com, The Wedding Planner, was chased with… yikes, another domestic-violence thriller, appropriately titled Enough. So it’s not unusual that Sydney Sweeney would follow her own star-turn rom-com Anyone But You with the genre movie Immaculate (for these purposes, we’ll count Madame Web as a business transaction, as she appears to), and it’s a sign of progress that she doesn’t spend it being menaced by an abusive ex-boyfriend. Moreover, Immaculate, a semi-nunsploitation horror movie about creepy goings-on at a convent in Italy, also sends a signal that America’s Sweetheart might have the soul of a scream queen.

It’s a title plenty of actresses have spent years avoiding. Though Jamie Lee Curtis has spoken affectionately about the horror genre, the start it gave her career, and her work in what now totals six different Halloween movies, she has also discussed how for years after the initial John Carpenter classic, she found it tough to get non-horror work. This has shifted over time, as horror has become less disreputable, and the 2020s have seen an explosion in prestige scream queens building entire careers out of horror cred. Jenna Ortega, star of X, two Scream sequels, and Wednesday, dipped out of the Scream series not for rom-com respectability, but to make more Wednesday and fulfill her goth destiny promoting the Beetlejuice sequel. Maika Monroe arguably got more juice and staying power from It Follows, Watcher, and The Guest than from her Independence Day sequel; her thriller Longlegs is one of the most anticipated mysteries of the summer from Immaculate distributor Neon.

There’s nothing especially goth about blonde, All-American Sydney Sweeney, nor necessarily pious, so at first she feels like an odd fit to play Sister Cecilia, a young American nun who arrives in Italy, barely speaking a word of the language, to work at a convent that provides hospice care to dying nuns. Cecilia is meek and virginal – not at all Sweeney’s vibes, which give off more Lapsed Catholic from a Hold Steady song than devout believer dedicating her life to the lord. She also feels out of place at a hushed Italian convent where time appears to have stood still for decades, starkly contrasting with her more modern affect – which is exactly the right effect evoked by director Michael Mohan, who worked with Sweeney on the erotic thriller The Voyeurs. The fish-out-of-water-and-investigating-mysterious-secrets dynamic is ultra-familiar, and Sweeney’s lost-girl attempt at piety expresses it clearly and concisely, perfect for a movie that runs about 85 minutes before the credits roll.

There isn’t a whole lot of depth to Immaculate’s intrigue; as you might guess from the title, Cecilia finds herself pregnant, an appropriate use of the passive voice because she has no distinct memory of anything that could have led to conception. Disturbing visions (or are they?!), jump scares, and mild body horror ensue, with fewer twists than the escalating corkscrew wildness of The Voyeurs. Mohan has some visual tricks to prolong the inevitable, like shots of a priest’s confessional that make the small dark enclave look distended and vast; the movie’s real weapon, however, in his obvious rapport with Sweeney. Her TV work provides ample evidence that she knows her way around a breakdown, and Immaculate tightens the tension between a younger person’s emotional tumult and a blood-soaked grit that fits her equally well – call it the wildness beneath her nun’s habit. Fair judgment or not, Sweeney looks more like the second or third victim in a slasher movie, not necessarily the resourceful Final Girl. And it’s exactly that bombshell image – the fact that she can play a Los Angeles actress standing on Hitchcock’s grave, answering the question “are you the girl in the movie?” – that makes her so effective and winning when she fights back.

Sweeney’s dismissal of her foray into the superhero world while promoting a nunsploitation movie may be a savvy PR move, but it also feels like an admission that there’s no shame in choosing the role of scream queen over that of franchise player. Sweeney also comes by this status naturally: One of her first roles was in John Carpenter’s most recent film, The Ward, and one of her first starring vehicles was the straight-to-streaming Blumhouse horror picture Nocturne. Even in Anyone But You, the kind of rom-com that typically invites young women to cosplay as Type A career-first professionals, she’s a little bit on edge, if not the bleeding kind.

After watching IMMACULATE this picture of Baby Sydney Sweeney on the set of THE WARD with John Carpenter back in 2010 makes me even happier – scream queen 4 life pic.twitter.com/Huevl4knRL

— Jason Adams (@JAMNPP) March 19, 2024

Indeed, Immaculate isn’t a transgressive instant-classic, despite a killer last 20 minutes and an ending that perfectly balances nasty shock with a sense of triumph. It’s very much a genre exercise, just as Mohan and Sweeney’s last collaboration was – and arguably shorter on the kind of potentially subversive sleaze that made The Voyeurs an instant addition to the pause-and-rewind canon. It probably won’t make as much money as Anyone But You, either. But while horror might have once been a disreputable way to get a star’s foot in the door, now it looks more like a statement of purpose – even, in the catharsis of its bloody mayhem, a declaration of independence.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.